{"id":13564,"date":"2024-12-07T15:51:31","date_gmt":"2024-12-07T15:51:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/artoday.net\/?p=13564"},"modified":"2024-12-07T15:51:32","modified_gmt":"2024-12-07T15:51:32","slug":"must-see-museum-shows-and-biennials","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artoday.net\/?p=13564","title":{"rendered":"Must-See Museum Shows and Biennials"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\n\tMultihyphenates rule this winter, a season headlined by attempts to fully assess artists whose work resists the traditional museum retrospective format. Within Germany alone, Shu Lea Cheang, who has shown her work in movie theaters, on the internet, and in art galleries, will finally get a career-spanning survey, and Semiha Berksoy, a Wagnerian soprano by training, will get an expansive show of her art. Leigh Bowery, an unclassifiable character associated with 1980s London, is getting a Tate retrospective, and Rammellzee, a Basquiat collaborator and a madcap graffiti artist, is having a Palais de Tokyo retrospective.<\/p>\n
\n\tThe ambition guiding these shows is shared by group exhibitions happening simultaneously. The Sharjah Biennial, the Middle East\u2019s foremost recurring art festival, returns, its five curators having opted for an \u201copen-ended proposition\u201d format guided mainly by the artists they\u2019ve chosen. In Chicago and Los Angeles, sprawling, knotty shows explore the African diaspora of the past, present, and future. In Switzerland and Norway, Northern European art, both of the modern and Gothic variety, takes center stage.<\/p>\n
\n\tUnder-recognized artists of the past are getting their due, with Ethel Carrick, Rachel Ruysch, and Gertrude Abercrombie among those receiving big shows. But it is lesser-known\u2014and more obscure\u2014artists of the more recent past that dominate museum programming this time around. Hamad Butt and Donald Rodney, two giants of recent British art history, are both being surveyed. Both died young, and both remain obscure beyond England. Canonization awaits them as new art histories are being told across the globe.<\/p>\n
\n\tBelow, a look at 40 of the winter\u2019s most exciting shows.<\/p>\n
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\u201cRachel Ruysch: Nature into Art\u201d at Alte Pinakothek, Munich<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Kunstmuseum Basel\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\n\tHow unfair it is Rachel Ruysch, a Dutch painter active during the 17th and 18th centuries, never made it into the history books. Ruysch\u2019s still lifes, cluttered as they are with gangly blooms and bountiful stems, wowed viewers during her day, but they have since been sidelined by the works of her male colleagues. No longer. This show assembles several dozen of her paintings\u2014around one-fifth of all the canvases she ever produced\u2014on the occasion of the 360th anniversary of her birth, with a special focus on how these works act as unlikely snapshots of Dutch colonialism in action. Expect the show, which will appear next year in the US at the Toledo Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, to do some art-historical rewriting of its own. A section of it will explore the life of Anna Ruysch, Rachel\u2019s sister, who was an artist in her own right.<\/p>\n
\n\tThrough March 16, 2025<\/em><\/p>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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\u201cLucy Bull: The Garden of Forking Paths\u201d at Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Courtesy the artist and David Kordansky Gallery\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\n\tLucy Bull has compared her vibrantly hued abstract paintings to Rorschach tests, suggesting that the images viewers see within them say a lot about their interior states. Psychology is generally not what most have discussed when they talk about Bull\u2014most have focused on the vast sums often attached to this young painter\u2019s canvases. But this show, billed as Bull\u2019s first-ever US museum show and opening during Art Basel Miami Beach, will offer a chance to see her art as more than a mere market phenomenon.<\/p>\n
Semiha Berksoy at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: \u00a9The Estate of Semiha Berksoy and Galerist\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\n\tThere aren\u2019t many opera singers who can say they had retrospectives at art museums, but the late Semiha Berksoy can now posthumously claim that rare achievement. With her art having recently appeared in the Venice Biennale, this Turkish multihyphenate is now getting an 80-work survey that will include her paintings and works on paper. In those pieces, Berksoy memorialized people in her circle, including her mother, who died when the artist was 8 years old, and revisited elements of the operas in which she sang, painting herself as she performed arias for rapt audiences. In doing so, Berksoy suggested a direct line between painting and performance\u2014art, for her, did not begin once she left center stage.<\/p>\n
\u201cHamad Butt: Apprehensions\u201d at Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Courtesy John Hansard Gallery\/Tate\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\n\tNot long before he died of AIDS-related causes at age 32 in 1994, Hamad Butt nearly died because of his art. He and a gallery director were driving one of his artworks\u2014a 1992 sculpture called Familiar Part 3,<\/em> Cradle<\/em>, composed of hanging glass balls filled with chlorine gas\u2014when the car ran over a plastic bottle, causing the piece to come perilously close to breaking open. His work often functioned that way, offering up elegant sculptures that could kill their viewers if disturbed. In that way, they acted as metaphors for the fragility of his own body. His first-ever retrospective assembles a grouping of these dangerous, alluring objects, placing a special focus on the Pakistani-born artist\u2019s identity as a queer Muslim man of the South Asian diaspora.<\/p>\n
Ethel Carrick at National Gallery of Australia, Canberra<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: National Gallery of Australia\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\n\tAs a year of celebrations toasting Impressionism\u2019s 150th anniversary draws to a close, Australia\u2019s foremost museum is impassionedly making the case for the canonization of Ethel Carrick, a British-born painter whose fame sometimes has sometimes taken a backseat to that of her husband, the artist Emanuel Phillips Fox. Carrick\u2019s full-dress retrospective will prove that she was equally adept at Impressionist styles as him, depicting market scenes and landscapes that dissolve into brushy arrays of strokes. A core focus of this 140-work show is Carrick\u2019s internationalism\u2014the ways that her travels across Europe, India, and North Africa shaped her stylistic choices.<\/p>\n
\u201cEchoes from the Borderlands\u201d at Dia Art Foundation, New York<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Courtesy Echoes from the Borderlands Archive\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\n\tNew York may be far away from the borderlands between the US and Mexico, but the geographical distance between the two locales will feel much shorter this December when the voices of people from California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas fill the cavernous galleries of Dia\u2019s Manhattan space. The three people behind this sound piece\u2014writer Valeria Luiselli, journalist Ricardo Giraldo, and composer Leo Heiblum\u2014have intended the work as a testament to the layered histories of violence and survival that have accumulated in the borderlands. To hear the piece in full requires a time investment: its four segments run 24 hours in total.<\/p>\n
\u201cllona Keser\u00fc: Flow\u201d at Muzeum Susch, Switzerland<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Courtesy the artist\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\n\tAlthough Ilona Keser\u00fc paints abstractions, nearly all of her compositions seem corporeal, with vibrantly hued, wavy forms that variously recall the outlines of faces, fulsome hips, and people in motion. Her art is in that way intimately related to bodies, even when they are not outright depicted. Well-known in her home country of Hungary and less often seen beyond it, Keser\u00fc\u2019s art now gets the survey it deserves, with a special emphasis on the material qualities of paintings, some of which are embossed and stitched so that they move into the third dimension.<\/p>\n
\u201cProjects: Marlon Mullen\u201d at Museum of Modern Art, New York<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: \u00a92024 Marlon Mullen\/Collection of Martin and Rebecca Eisenberg\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\n\tWorking from his studio at the NIAD Art Center, an organization that has devoted itself to people with developmental disabilities, Marlon Mullen has painted the covers of print issues by ARTnews<\/em>, Art in America<\/em>, Artforum<\/em>, and other art publications. The smeary, slightly warped images that result suggest highly personal interpretations of publications meant mainly for the art world elite. Mullen eyes those covers with admiration\u2014and suspicion. Twenty-five of his charming paintings will be assembled here in this show, astoundingly his first ever at an institution of MoMA\u2019s caliber.<\/p>\n
\u201cProject a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica\u201d at Art Institute of Chicago<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\n\tThis season\u2019s most ambitious show is \u201cProject a Black Planet,\u201d a 350-object exhibition about how artists have responded to the movement to view Africa as a unified whole. With a specific focus on Garveyism, N\u00e9gritude, and Quilombismo, the show acts as both a useful history lesson and a wide-reaching survey of how artists have adopted Pan-Africanist tenets in conceptual ways. Take the case of Yto Barrada\u2019s Tectonic Plate<\/em> (2010), in which a map of the world is represented using movable pieces. All of those pieces can be dragged toward Africa, the suggestion being that the continent still exerts a strong pull on the world\u2014even when its diasporas are not always evident.<\/p>\n
\u201cImagining Black Diasporas: 21st-Century Art and Poetics\u201d at Los Angeles County Museum of Art<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: \u00a9Sandra Brewster\/Courtesy the artist and Olga Korper Gallery\/Los Angeles County Museum of Art\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\n\tThis exhibition\u2019s diverse offerings include meditations on the Black Lives Matter movement and British colonialism in Ghana, collages of cut-out images of body parts, and photographed landscapes silkscreened onto canvas. The 70 works contained here do not evince a singular aesthetic, which, of course, is the point. Among the artists behind those works are Zohra Opoku, Awol Erizku, Abdoulaye Ndoye, and Yinka Shonibare.<\/p>\n
\u201cRasquachismo\u201d at McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/figure>\n
\n\tIn 1989, scholar Tom\u00e1s Ybarra-Frausto theorized rasquachismo<\/em>, a term that he described as \u201can underdog perspective, a view from los de abajo.<\/em>\u201d The make-do aesthetic he was describing involved the upcycling of materials by Chicanx artists, whom he noted were re-utilizing cars, tchotchkes, and other ephemera\u2014what many might view as junk\u2014as a means of survival. Thirty-five years on, rasquachismo<\/em> and its feminist response, domesticana<\/em>, as postulated by artist Amalia Mesa-Bains, remains just as influential as it was then. This show surveys the aesthetic via works by Luis Jim\u00e9nez, Margarita Carbrera, Nivar Gonzalez, and more.<\/p>\n
Lubaina Himid at UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: \u00a9Lubaina Himid\/Courtesy the artist, Hollybush Gardens, London, and Greene Naftali, New York\/Photo Andy Keate\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\n\tThis imaginative painter, a key figure of the British Black Arts Movement of the 1980s, has for decades been creating installations and paintings that envision Black liberation in all its many forms. Having become the first Black woman ever to win the Turner Prize in 2017, she has since collected many accolades, including the Maria Lassnig Prize, which came with this exhibition, a survey of her works across the years. Included will be some of her newer paintings, in which people cloistered in domestic settings plot out how best to solve issues afflicting society, from the aftermath of colonialism to urgent ecological problems.<\/p>\n
\u201cGertrude Abercrombie: The Whole World Is a Mystery\u201d at Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Illinois State Museum\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\n\tIn the wake of Surrealism, there followed a flood of nonpareils, but even among them, Gertrude Abercrombie stands out for her singular weirdness. Starting in the 1930s, this Chicago-based artist produced tiny paintings of sparse, moonlit landscapes. Sometimes, they were peopled with cats and freestanding doors; other times, they contained stone-faced women and boulders. Dozens of eerie, unsettling, and transfixing paintings like these will figure in this show, which is being touted as the most comprehensive Abercrombie show ever staged.<\/p>\n
\u201cJoe Overstreet: Taking Flight\u201d at Menil Collection, Houston<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: \u00a9Estate of Joe Overstreet\/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York\/Photo Jenny Gorman\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\n\tThere were many artists who pushed abstract painting in new and strange directions during the 1960s, but none quite like Joe Overstreet, who freed his unstretched canvases from the wall, folding them and stringing them up so they appeared to stand alone. The gesture was an implicitly liberatory one in a way that synched with the politics of his more figurative work referring to the civil rights era and the Black Power movement. In this survey, both modes of working will be shown side by side, offering a rare and overdue look at this talented painter.<\/p>\n
\u201cAfter the End: Cartographies for Another Time\u201d at Centre Pompidou-Metz, France<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Image \u00a9Centre Pompidou-Metz\/\u00a92024 ADAGP, Paris\/Photo Patrick Brunet\/Collection of Royald Lally\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\n\tWhen he directed Madrid\u2019s Museo Reina Sof\u00eda, Manuel Borja-Villel polarized local critics by disregarding the prevailing Western narrative of recent art history\u2014he disturbed the traditional flow of European modernism and lured artists from Africa, Asia, and Latin America into the mix. He\u2019ll continue that sensibility with this group show, whose theoretically ambitious thesis centers around how artists have disregarded the typical understanding of time\u2019s flow. Per the exhibition\u2019s description, neoliberalism and Eurocentrism will be rebutted; artists from the Caribbean are put front and center. Among those artists are modernists such as Rubem Valentim, Wilfredo Lam, Maya Deren, and Baya, as well as contemporary artists such as Basma Al-Sharif, Kapwani Kiwanga, and Myrlande Constant.<\/p>\n
\u201cNorthern Lights\u201d at Fondation Beyeler, Riehen, Switzerland<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Munchmuseet, Oslo\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\n\tDiscussions of modernist landscape painting inevitably center around Impressionist art, but this exhibition of Scandinavian and Canadian artists working between 1880 and 1930 suggests that Frenchmen didn\u2019t necessarily dominate the genre. Boreal forests are ostensibly the subject of all 80 works in this exhibition, whose transatlantic focus underlines how a single biome can exert just as strong an influence upon artists as geography. But not every work here represents real-world sights\u2014you are unlikely to see coniferous trees and snow-swept peaks, for example, in works by Hilma af Klint, whose abstractions channeled spiritual states.<\/p>\n
\u201cBrasil! Brasil! The Birth of Modernism\u201d at Royal Academy of Arts, London<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: \u00a9Lasar Segall\/Pinacoteca do Estado de S\u00e3o Paulo\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\n\t\u201cI want to be the painter of my country,\u201d wrote Tarsila do Amaral in 1923. Her paintings of bulbous creatures set among verdant landscapes helped her achieve that goal, making her one the most famous modernists in Brazil for a period, but this exhibition proposes that nine others ought to share the mantle of helping to define a new aesthetic paradigm for the country. Across 130 works, the exhibition shows that abstraction could be seeded with nationalist potential, with recognizably Brazilian images and symbols synthesized with artistic innovations pouring in from Europe.<\/p>\n
Alexej von Jawlensky at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Max Ehrengruber\/Private Collection, Riehen, Switzerland\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\n\tStanding before one of Alexej von Jawlensky\u2019s paintings from the 1920s, in which jagged planes of color assemble to form highly abstracted faces, it can be hard to imagine that this Russian-born painter ever worked in figuration. In fact, before linking up with the German Expressionists, he painted recognizable landscapes and people\u2014subject matter that, with its lively color palette and odd perspectival effects, appeared to veer close to abstraction without ever succumbing to it. His turn away from representational imagery will be traced in this survey.<\/p>\n
\u201cHaegue Yang: Lost Lands and Sunken Fields\u201d at Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Chuho An\/Courtesy Kukje Gallery\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\n\tThe South Korean\u2013born star will here debut a sprawling new work filled with moss, river rocks, and banknotes stuffed between faux stones. The installation, titled Mignon Votives<\/em> (2025), is being billed as a statement on nature in flux, but the joy of this artist\u2019s work is its mysteriousness, its unwillingness to make sense. Alongside that piece, she will show other works that resist easy reads, including her beloved sculptures with bells affixed to their surfaces.<\/p>\n
\u201cIthell Colquhoun: Between Worlds\u201d at Tate St. Ives, England<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: \u00a9Tate\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\n\tIn her painting Scylla<\/em> (1938), Ithell Colquhoun shows a little ship passing between two boulders sticking out of a shallow ocean. But those boulders look less like rocks than they do legs, and the algae between them looks less like aquatic plant life than pubic hair. This double entendre typifies the plainspoken weirdness evident in many works by Colquhoun, a British artist who drew parallels between female bodies and the world that surrounds them. A Surrealist who was formally kicked out of the movement after her flirtations with occultism, Colquhoun has long been denied proper canonization. Here, at long last, comes her big opportunity in the form of a 200-work retrospective drawing heavily on the Tate\u2019s vast holdings of her art, a relatively recent addition to the museum network\u2019s collection.<\/p>\n
\n\tPrecious Okoyomon has earned widespread acclaim for room-filling installations composed of plants, sculpted figures, and occasionally even animals\u2014the one they produced for the 2022 Venice Biennale featured live butterflies that could be spotted around streams and kudzu. The prolific young artist has not yet revealed what they have in store for the Kunsthaus Bregenz, a beloved contemporary art museum that specializes in extremely large and extremely challenging commissions, but the institution has said their show will feature installations that deal with \u201ctheir dreams and humanity.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cGabriel Orozco: Polit\u00e9cnico Nacional\u201d at Museo Jumex, Mexico City<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Museo Universitario Arte Contempor\u00e1neo\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\n\tYielding Stone<\/em> (1992), one of Gabriel Orozco\u2019s most famous works, involved rolling a plasticine ball around Mexico City. The ball collected debris strewn across city streets and came to bear the imprints of sewers it moved across, and in that way acted as a record of all that it came into contact with. Orozco\u2019s continued efforts in the years since to create artworks that capture his surroundings and the flow of time have made him one of Mexico\u2019s most celebrated living artists. Some 300 of those works will be brought together for this mega-survey, Orozco\u2019s first in his home country since 2006.<\/p>\n
\u201cWafaa Bilal: Indulge Me\u201d at Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: \u00a9Wafaa Bilal\/Courtesy the artist\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\n\tAs responses to the US-led war in Iraq go, few have been quite so memorable as Wafaa Bilal\u2019s Dog or Iraqi<\/em> (2008), a deeply upsetting piece in which he had people vote online on whether he, an Iraqi-born artist, or Buddy, a canine companion, should be waterboarded. (Bilal was ultimately picked to be the torture victim and subsequently fulfilled the task.) The piece typifies Bilal\u2019s practice, which has incisively explored how the internet and the media have inured Americans to conflicts that take place abroad. During a time when the US is being forced to assess its involvement in another conflict in the Middle East, this one in Gaza, Bilal\u2019s MCA survey is likely to strike a chord.<\/p>\n
Sharjah Biennial<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Photo Karim Sahib\/AFP via Getty Images\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\n\tIf most biennials are provided with a concrete theme and just one curator, this edition of the foremost recurring art exhibition in the Middle East functions differently. It has five curators, not one\u2014Alia Swastika, Amal Khalaf, Megan Tamati-Quennell, Natasha Ginwala, and Zeynep \u00d6z\u2014and they have termed their theme \u201can open-ended proposition\u201d because it has evolved repeatedly since their show was first announced. They\u2019ve said that the artists themselves have helped mold the theme. Among those artists are Cassi Namoda, Alia Farid, Naeem Mohaiemen, Raven Chacon, and the Te Matahiapo Collective.<\/p>\n
\u201cAmerican Photography\u201d at Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: \u00a9Amanda L\u00f3pez\/National Museum for American History, Washington, D.C.\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\n\tNever mind that early photography was pioneered by Brits and Frenchmen\u2014this show posits that it was Americans who\u2019ve steered the medium\u2019s course all along. Across the 200 pictures featured here, there will be advertisements, studio photographs, documentary photographs, and experimental images; the show\u2019s curators have committed to no one aesthetic, viewing the tradition as diverse and impossible to entirely pin down. Ming Smith, Nan Goldin, Andy Warhol, Lisette Model, and James Van der Zee are among the greats who will be featured here.<\/p>\n
\u201cNancy Holt: Power Systems\u201d at Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: \u00a9Holt\/Smithson Foundation\/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York\/Courtesy Wexner Center for the Arts\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\n\tThe gauges and clanking pipes used to warm buildings are typically contained within walls, where they are kept out of sight, out of mind. But for her 1984 installation Heating System<\/em>, Nancy Holt rearranged these pipes so they now wound their way through a gallery space\u2014viewers could not possibly ignore the building infrastructure. That gem of an artwork, not seen since 1985, now makes a rare appearance in this survey, which features sculptures, photographs, and films in which Holt made the case that our existence was predicated upon systems we\u2019d rather not think much about.<\/p>\n
\u201cJoyce Wieland: Heart On\u201d at Montreal Museum of Fine Arts<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: \u00a9National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa\/Art Gallery of Ontario\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\n\tIn her art, Canadian artist Joyce Wieland reused her flag\u2019s red and white tones in images and objects that invoked womanhood\u2014lipstick kisses on sheets of paper, a maroon brassiere against a white background, a canvas stained with pinkish splotches that recalled menstrual bleeding. For her, this was all a means of casting Canada as a feminist entity, showing that women were central to her nation during the 1960s and \u201970s, a time when gender parity was even farther from being achieved than it is today. Perhaps for that very reason, Wieland broke new ground for women artists in Canada, and now, a new generation will have access to her films, sewn artworks, paintings, and more via this retrospective, the late artist\u2019s first in her home country in more than 30 years.<\/p>\n
\u201cCaspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature\u201d at Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Photo J\u00f6rg P. Anders\/Courtesy State Museum in Berlin\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\n\tIn 2023, Germany spent the year toasting this Romantic painter, whose visions of people contemplating seas and forests continue to inspire fear and awe roughly two centuries after they were made. The multitude of exhibitions that resulted belies the fact that those outside Germany have less often had access to his art\u2014the US, for example, has seen exactly two significant shows devoted to him. Make that three in 2025, when the Met opens this 75-work survey that features rare loans such as Monk by the Sea<\/em> (1808\u201310), the ultimate expression of Friedrich\u2019s fascination with sublime states at the limits of vision. That painting, along with others here, has never before been shown in this country.<\/p>\n
\u201cWitnessing Humanity: The Art of John Wilson\u201d at Museum of Fine Arts, Boston<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Estate of John Wilson\/Private Collection\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\n\tThe MFA Boston is located not far from the neighborhood of Roxbury, where John Wilson is treated as something of a local legend. Now, Wilson is being awarded a retrospective that aspires to bring him to the attention of the nation writ large. Traveling to the Metropolitan Museum of Art following its run in Boston, the show focuses on how Wilson dignified the Black people he represented with a humanity that white artists denied them during the 20th century. All the while, he used modernist strategies to confront the horrors of racism, using the visual languages of Mexican muralism and European sculpture to immortalize the most pressing issues impacting his community.<\/p>\n
\u201cChristine Sun Kim: All Day All Night\u201d at Whitney Museum, New York<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Photo Lawrence Sumulong\/TED\/Getty Images\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\n\tThis exhibition is in some ways a homecoming for Christine Sun Kim, who, for seven years, acted as an educator and a consultant for the Whitney, where she focused on Deaf visitors and designed events led in ASL. That labor, though not exactly an artwork, dovetailed with her artistic practice, which has utilized musical notation and conceptual strategies to ponder the differences and similarities between ASL and written English. She plays on the intersections between the two in works such as Prolonged Echo<\/em> (2023), a mural that translates the ASL sign for the word \u201cecho\u201d into a thick black line that bounces around a set of walls, along with the words \u201cHAND\u201d and \u201cPALM\u201d above, to denote a gesture that is tough to represent using written English.<\/p>\n
\u201cAlice Coltrane, Monument Eternal\u201d at Hammer Museum, Los Angeles<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: \u00a91970 Chuck Stewart Photography, LLC\/Fireball Entertainment Group\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\n\tIn keeping with recent shows memorializing figures such as James Baldwin, Joan Didion, and more, this show is less an exhibition about the titular jazz musician than it is a tribute to various facets of her personality and output. Divided into sections about spirituality, sound, and what curator Erin Christovale has called \u201cArchitectural Intimacy,\u201d the show does include archival materials and audio related to Coltrane, but the true stars of the exhibition are the 19 contemporary artists responding to her life. Among them is the filmmaker Ephraim Asili, who will debut a new film about Coltrane\u2019s harp, a posthumous gift of sorts from her husband, the jazz musician John Coltrane, who died before she received it.<\/p>\n
\u201cLinder: Danger Came Smiling\u201d at Hayward Gallery, London<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: \u00a9Linder Sterling\/Courtesy of the artist; Modern Art, London; Blum, Los Angeles, Tokyo, New York; Andr\u00e9hn-Schiptjenko, Stockholm, Paris and d\u00e9pendance, Brussels\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\n\tWith a medical grade scalpel in hand, Linder has excised from magazines images of all kinds\u2014fashion models, manicured hands, consumer objects, and lips, lots of them\u2014and rearranged them to form collages. A punk at heart, she uses her savage methods to rebut the violence inherent in the male gaze. Her feminist experiments across the years form the basis of this retrospective, which explores how her photomontages explore sex, sexuality, and liberation.<\/p>\n
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